I've studied the film industry, both academically and informally, for 25 years and extensively written about it for the last five years. My outlets for film criticism, box office commentary, and film-skewing scholarship have included The Huffington Post, Salon, and Film Threat. Follow me at @ScottMendelson.

The author is a Forbes contributor. The opinions expressed are those of the writer.

PG-13, Not Piracy, Killed 'Expendables 3'

The Expendables 3opened with $16 million last weekend, a big comedown from the $28m debut of Expendables 2 and the $35m debut of Expendables. There will be a debate over the next few weeks over the cause(s) of this sadly underwhelming debut. Putting aside mere franchise fatigue and/or the notion that American moviegoers decided that two mostly underwhelming “all-star action stars to the rescue” capers were enough, there will be a debate over whether or not the online leaking of a DVD-quality version of the film three weeks prior to its debut was a major factor. But the factor that most bears discussing, because there are clear lessons to be learned beyond “don’t let your movie get leaked online,” is the choice for Millennium Entertainment and Lionsgate to cut the Sylvester Stallone action film down to a PG-13 rating.

First, let’s discuss the piracy factor. The Expendables 3 was apparently downloaded 2.2 million times over the last three weeks, so it presumably was watched by at least 2.2 million people worldwide, who in turn either shared the file or told their friends their personal opinion of the film heading into the weekend. That’s no small potatoes, even if you acknowledge that not every one of those down-loaders are American and presumably the vast majority of them were the sorts that download films on a regular basis and thus were never going to see Expendables 3 in a theater in the first place. I would argue that the online audience for Expendables 3 was notable but not of a size that would have crippled a film that otherwise was racing towards a $25-$30m debut weekend.

For the record, that I don’t believe that piracy delivered a killing blow to Expendables 3 does not amount to an endorsement of piracy or a refusal to admit the real harm that it causes, especially to smaller films that end up on torrent sites about 30 seconds after their VOD or DVD debuts. That being said, I still believe that the key factor, putting aside perhaps inevitable franchise fatigue and the fact that the films don’t have a sterling artistic reputation, was the choice to edit the Patrick Hughes film down to a PG-13 rating. Despite the attempt to corral younger moviegoers, Expendables 3 played 66% to ages 25 years old and up. So the choice to remove the (presumably CGI) blood and gore and cut the action in a way to better obscure the actual carnage did little more than annoy hardcore fans of the series while the younger kids saw Paramount’s (Viacom, Inc.) Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or Walt Disney’s Guardians of the Galaxy and the older kids saw 20th Century Fox’s R-rated Let’s Be Cops.

The obsession with chasing down the specific young (white) male demographic is (I would argue) foolhardy when you consider how infrequently they are choosing to go to the movies these days. Hollywood seemingly spends all of its time chasing a demographic (young boys aged 12-17) that makes up around 8% of the theatrical audience while seemingly ignoring everyone else. Did Colombiana ($60m on a $40m budget)or Lockout ($32m/$20m)or White House Down ($205m/$150m) really benefit from having their obviously R-rated violence and subject matter finessed for that PG-13 rating? X-Files: I Want To Believe would have benefited from an R-rating for its gruesome organ-harvesting plot at least to give (now grown up) fans something they had never seen before from the show or the previous (and much more expensive) feature film.

There are a few instances where an R-13 might have helped at the box office (the Bourne series and Live Free or Die Hardcome to mind), but the common example is Sony’s Total Recall remake, which was produced as a PG-13 and then ignored by the kids who were just seeing The Dark Knight Risesagain. Regardless of whose decision it was for Expendables 3 to go PG-13 (Millennium, Nu Image, Lionsgate, or Stallone himself as has been implied), it is a little disheartening. Lionsgate as a studio was often a bright light in a rather dark time for explicitly adult entertainment. As the post-Columbine panic and obsessive pursuit of the four-quadrant global blockbuster took hold elsewhere, Lionsgate was still the studio that would release unapologetically R-rated genre films like Saw or Crank or Good Luck Chuck.

One of the reasons I always championed “The House That Jigsaw Built” is that they felt like one of the last places for mainstream R-rated content in a variety of genres, a true grind-house studio that also distributed Oliver Stone‘s W.and Akeelah and the Bee. One film does not make a mission statement, and they (wide) released several R-rated films in 2013 (The Last Stand, You’re Next, The Big Wedding, etc.). But the studio that gave us Rambo will, depending on the rating and size of release for this October’s Addicted (a romantic drama/thriller from Billie Woodruff), go all of 2014 with at-best a single wide R-rated release. This is ironic as bigger studios have begun to acknowledge the benefit of R-rated films when attracting older audiences, as even Luc Besson (whose output was a prime example of the “cut to PG-13 in America” trend in the 2000′s) allowed Lucy to go out as an R-rating to career-high directorial success.

If piracy is a major factor in the box office defeat of Expendables 3, then that is something that has to be dealt with that has little to do with production and marketing. I would start by establishing actual consequences for writers who boasted about downloading Expendables 3 and now complains that his paid theatrical viewing is worthy of a refund. But putting that aside for a moment, I think Hollywood as a whole needs to take a look at the statistics and see who is really seeing the movies in theaters today. That doesn’t mean we need an R-rated Superman movie or a NC-17 cut of Step Up: All In (although mixing-and-matching actors from the Expendables and Step Up movies would obviously save both franchises), but I would argue that we shouldn’t automatically presume that a PG-13 is the preferred rating for every movie, especially ones that don’t cost $150 million to produce.

I can’t presume that an un-pirated and R-rated Expendables 3 would have been a $250 million-$300m worldwide hit like the first two films, and I cannot ignore the spate of R-rated action flops (Sabotage, Escape Plan, Homefront, etc.) that peppered the multiplexes over the last year or two. But I can all-but-guarantee that going PG-13 lost the third film valuable fans who stayed home due to the promised lack of blood-and-gore while the kids either didn’t care or were forbidden due to parents who realized that a PG-13 Expendables was basically the same movie with less blood and F-bombs. When you have a franchise that is absolutely rooted in watching cinema’s toughest action stars of old engaging in old-school R-rated violence and carnage, you lose half of your trump card by going soft on violence for the sake of an audience too young to care about said franchise and overwhelmed with more enticing options.

Come what may, Expendables 3 was the very definition of cutting your nose to spite your face.

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I think it’s Funny that they think us hardcore action fans would stoop to stretching dvd resolution on the giant HD to 4k hd tv’s we own, we can barely tolerate 720p for comedy and will settle for nothing less than 1080p and DTS on our action movies. I doubt if anyone who would have payed to see it downloaded the leak.

didn’t download it. The second they announced it was PG-13 I had NO interest in watching the movie or giving them my money. The first two (mainly the 1st) were fun because of the “R” over the top violence. They killed their fanbase and with that their opening weekend. I’ll see the unrated blu-ray when it comes out.

The movie is good if you love watching these actors. The leak hurt it, but the PG rating hit the film the hardest. I watched Exp 1 again and it reminded me how much better these films are with over the top violence. I hate to say it, but it needed blood and guts – just like the first one.

Yup, yup and yup. PG-13 was the killer for sure. Suddenly it felt like the film was trying to compete with TMNT when an R rating would have put it in its own category and made audiences have to choose to see a movie with a bunch of kids or not.